An older writing from the time I used to walk on the nearest mountain, where I grew up, in my hometown. The original was written in Greek.
I sink into the green. I’m learning to simplify.
My paper is not straight enough. I press it and crush it with my fingers. In every breath of air and scratching the leaves – I feel like they are watching me. I’m sitting cross-legged on some bushes – inside a huge puddle braided by thorny bushes. My bottom in different shapes. At least here it’s quiet, there is view and shade. I have a positive predisposition – I enter the role of the optimist. I enter the role of an optimistic, of a dreamy girl who pretends to look so careless at the sun’s rays, which hit the shutters and reflect beautifully on the windows. Fantastic laser beams. Now I’m miles away – exactly twelve minutes away from home. I’m not there but I can clearly imagine what’s happening there. Now. At the same time. I wonder if my imagination would have been as enhanced if I had been three hours away or maybe two days? Or more than two hundred meters away? On my soft, green T-shirt hang some lovely fuzzy plant balls. I probably unwittingly collected them from various plants, trying to climb up the hill. The black, linen, long pants save my legs from their brutal looting. The whole place is drowned in the bushes. It was a mistake the application of sandals on my lower limbs – I got thorns hooked into my flesh. I pull them out one by one and I see, how the skin is getting cut. Slits, slits, everywhere slices of human flesh. And as I sit in the puddle bent over, I turn every three and a half to check the half-cut tree behind me – yes, I’m convinced this tree is a human and will harm me. Immediately. Just because it happens to be behind me. The tendency to control. I feel it and smell it. And I don’t like it at all, but it’s there present. Would it be the same if the tree was in front of me? The trees in front of me don’t look so threatening. The tiny flies (I call them little louses) in front of my face disorientate me. They move unusually coordinated. Like a herd. A “herd of flies”. How funny is that?! The sun is sinking. I have no idea if I’ll manage to read at least one page of my book.
I started reading – again – a book I used to read in elementary school. The fact that I was reading this book in elementary school does not automatically mean that it was a “simple” book. What does it even mean? A “simple book”? Anyway, I then started reading it again. I admit it (why not after all). For so many years I could not accept the fact that at the age of eleven I could not understand what that book was saying. So I decided to try it again later. When I grew up – and I was more mature – I became wise and gained all the knowledge I needed to understand this one and only book. If I ever would manage to finish it. A book on mathematics, which – attention please! – I never fainted, but I was scared of. And there is the big difference: grief and fear. Hate and Fear. It was really a phobia; I remember the first, cowardly, cute panic attacks in elementary school when we were preparing to count fruits or when I was looking at whole black queues on the blackboard – in between crosses, lines and a pair of nostrils side by side (division in maths). I don’t want to be scared. That’s why I’ve been trying for almost twenty years after counting queues without having to run to the toilet. On the first pages, one of the two characters presents math as the simplest thing in the world. I want to believe him. That is why I continue to read that book. I think that if I manage to overcome my fear of numbers, I will win in “simplicity”, so I will reasonably stop thinking complex.
Which means that – logically – I won’t be bothered by the flies above my head, or the trees that happen to be rooted somewhere behind me and looking like human silhouettes.
Lignes invisibiles 